For the briefest fraction of a heartbeat, the false god's cold detachment wavered.
His pale eyes narrowed, the golden pupils contracting as they fixed onto Nero. In the midst of the barren wasteland, the radiance pouring from the youth was not merely bright—it carried the sovereign, ancient heat of an origin that predated the very heavens he claimed to rule.
"Curious," the angel murmured, his six pristine wings rustling behind his back with the sound of drawn steel. "A dormant spark..."
He tilted his head, studying Nero as if examining an unexpected flaw in an otherwise ruined gemstone. But just as quickly as the curiosity had flared, it was snuffed out beneath an ocean of bottomless arrogance. The cruel smirk returned to his lips.
"Yet an ember among ashes is still only ash. A defect remains a defect."
With a flick of his pale wrist, he dismissed his son entirely, turning his attention to the rest of the gathered mortals.
"Consume them," he commanded softly.
The six massive Mana Devourers shrieked—a soundless vibration that tore through the minds of everyone present. Their shifting, grey forms swelled, hundreds of unblinking eyes rolling wildly in their gelatinous masses as dozens of barbed tendrils whipped through the air, hurtling toward the two entourages like living siege engines.
"Don't let them scatter you!" Talon's voice cut through the oppressive air like a whip.
The blind broker stood firm, the black cloth over his eyes rippling in the turbulent gale. His senses, honed to absolute razor sharpness at the Ninth Level of the Aura Master Stage, read the shifting mana currents in an instant.
"Their cores are unstable!" Talon roared, his dark wind already spiraling around his hands. "These are not ancient leviathans—they are at the Aura Master stage at best! Form teams of two! Support each other and sever their tendrils before they latch onto your meridians!"
Before the words had even finished echoing, the battlefield split into synchronized motion.
"Silva, with me!" Cornelius barked, planting his feet into the cracked stone. His heavy staff whipped around in an iron arc, the veteran general's battle aura flaring to life to meet the first descending tendril.
Silva stepped in beside his grandfather without hesitation. Darkness mana swirled along the length of his own wooden staff, the crushing weight of Pandora's presence lending a terrifying density to his strikes. Together, grandfather and grandson moved as an unbreakable pillar against the first lunging beast.
To their left, Talon moved with fluid precision, intercepting a cluster of barbed whips aimed directly at David. The young prince, standing at the absolute precipice of the Elemental Aura Stage and just shy of breaking through to an Aura Master, drew his imperial blade with cold focus. David parried the flanking tendrils with disciplined, lethal thrusts while Talon's wind blades shredded the creature's reaching limbs to dust.
"Julie, left flank!" June called out, her calm demeanor vanishing as her fox ears flattened against her head.
"Way ahead of you!" Julie laughed, though her crimson eyes were sharp as daggers.
The twins moved like a single organism. Operating together with the complete synchronization of an Aura Master, their crimson robes blurred across the ash, four crimson tails fanning behind each of them. Julie wove blinding illusions that drew the second Devourer's eyes in circles, while June unleashed ribbons of dark-blue foxfire that charred the creature's regenerating grey flesh into smoking ruin.
On the imperial flank, Emperor Darius moved with imperial fury. His blade roared with golden light, meeting the fourth beast head-on while Marcus guarded his blind spots with shield and spear, executing battlefield maneuvers drilled into him since youth. Nearby, Prince George fought like a madman possessed, his heavy broadsword cleaving through grey flesh with unrestrained brutality while Prince John stood back-to-back with him, his bowstring humming endlessly as golden arrows pierced the creature's pulsating sensory nodes with uncanny precision.
Yet amidst the roaring secondary battle, one presence vanished entirely.
Nero did not join a pair. The moment the Devourers lunged, he extinguished the blinding pillar of Ray's light, folding his aura inward until he became a ghost upon the battlefield. Drawing upon the strange, newly awakened depth of the First Stage of the Supreme Realm, Nero blended seamlessly into the smoke and chaos, his golden eyes locked in an unblinking, lethal gaze upon the six-winged figure above.
He was waiting. Stalking. Searching for a single grain of mortal weakness in an immortal shell.
Above them all, the sky tore open.
"Die, you miserable coward!"
Kala's shriek shook the heavens. She ascended like a dark comet, black primordial fire cascading behind her in wings of pure demonic fury. At the Fifth Stage of the Supreme Realm, her aura was an endless, suffocating abyss, her demonic claws raking across space itself as she closed the distance toward her former mate.
Beside her, Scarlet moved without a sound.
The matriarch of the Fox Family unfolded her tessen. At the Sixth Stage, Scarlet was a tempest of absolute lethality; five phantom tails of burning crimson mana unfurled behind her, each one towering like a pillar of celestial flame. Space bent and cracked around her steps as she flanked the angel from above, trapping him in a pincer of primordial darkness and scorching foxfire.
The six-winged angel did not move an inch from his pedestal of air. He merely looked at the two women rushing toward him and let out a disdainful scoff.
"Insolent pests."
His six wings snapped forward.
BOOM!
A shockwave of sterile, blinding radiance erupted from his feathers, smashing into Kala's dark flames with the force of two colliding stars. The sky turned into a violent canvas of gold and black. Kala's claws tore through the first layer of his divine barrier, her demonic strength gouging sparks of white light from his flesh, but the angel's upper right wing swept downward like a falling blade, striking her chest and sending her crashing back toward the earth.
Before he could follow through, Scarlet was already behind his neck.
Her iron fan snapped shut, thrusting forward like a spear coated in concentrated, swirling spatial flames. The attack bypassed the outer shockwave entirely, piercing toward the base of his divine spine.
"Impudent fox," the angel hissed. His lower wings folded backward at an impossible angle, catching Scarlet's fan between dense, light-forged plumage.
The resulting detonation flattened the withered forest for hundreds of yards. Scarlet flipped gracefully through the air, her nine crimson tails whipping to disperse the immense kinetic force, blood trickling from the corner of her lips even as she smiled with savage delight.
"Is that all your divine throne taught you?" Scarlet taunted, her voice ringing clear over the roar of battle. "You flap your wings like an overgrown pigeon!"
"Die together, then!"
The angel thrust both hands outward. Hundreds of spears of crystallized light materialized in the heavens, raining down upon the two women with apocalyptic speed. Kala rebounded from the crater below, her primordial mana forming a massive shield of black demonic bone to intercept the deluge, while Scarlet wove through the falling light like a crimson ghost, redirecting stray spears straight back at the false god with flicks of her tessen.
It was a staggering, brutal battle of attrition.
The angel held the absolute advantage of the Ninth Level of the Supreme Realm, his mana reserves vast and seemingly inexhaustible. Every casual strike he unleashed threatened to tear the fabric of the earth apart. Yet Kala's primordial durability and Scarlet's superior Sixth Stage mastery allowed them to weather the storm, trading flesh and blood to drag the divine entity into a grinding, exhausting stalemate.
Beneath the cataclysmic exchange of the three powerhouses, the battle against the Mana Devourers raged on.
Silva shattered a lunging tendril with a sweeping blow of his staff, darkness mana corroding the creature's grey flesh while Cornelius drove his weapon straight through its central mass, pinning it to the ground.
"They don't feel pain, Silva!" Cornelius warned, his breath coming in ragged bursts. "Destroy the nodes!"
"Got it!" Silva shouted, spinning his staff overhead as he channelled his wind affinity to slice through three reaching eyes at once.
To their flank, David parried a whipping tendril with his blade, the alien force numbing his arm. "Talon! It's shifting!"
"I have it," Talon replied calmly, raising two fingers. A murder of solid shadow crows erupted from his coat, their beaks coated in compressed air as they dove into the creature's core, tearing the mana pathways apart from the inside out.
The pairs held their ground with grim determination, bleeding and straining beneath the endless endurance required to destroy the regenerating horrors.
And in the blind spot between the Devourers' chaotic thrashing and the apocalyptic sky, Nero moved.
He was twenty paces away from his father's descending flight path, crouched low beneath the smoke of a burnt oak. His golden eyes tracked the micro-movements of the six wings above. He saw it—the fraction of a second when his father rotated his lower wings to parry Scarlet's foxfire, leaving a single, unguarded point beneath his left shoulder exposed to Kala's darkness.
A pathway where divine light momentarily thinned to nothing.
In the sky above, as the angel prepared another crushing wave of radiance to obliterate the two women, a sudden, instinctual chill pricked the back of his neck.
For the first time in millennia, the false god felt the silent, terrifying sensation of being hunted.